Imbert & Cie of Grasse
(a French spa town near Nice, famed for its production of aromatic essences
and perfume) was already active as a printer of books and other paper
items in the early 1890s. The perfume industry requires the quality printing
of labels and this may have been Imbert's door to this field of the business.

On the other side, the hotel
business was experiencing a boom at the Cote d'Azur in the late XIX century
and the demand for hotel labels boomed with it.

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The date of the earliest labels
by Imbert & Cie is not known, but the oldest I have in my collection
show a design characteristic of the earliest years of the XX century and
it is indeed likely that the production may have started around 1900.

There is not a "Imbert
Style" as there are Richter or Boutillier styles, but all the early
Imbert labels, eclectic as they are, share the same high quality of graphic
design and wonderful lithographic rendition.

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Seemingly, Imbert
did not actively seek the hotel label business because most of its production
was for French hotels and, of this, practically all for a restricted geographical
area including the Cote d'Azur (particularly Nice, Cannes, Monte-Carlo and
Menton) and a few nearby spas like its home town and Aix-les-Bains. This
lack of interest in expansion may mean that the printer's other fields of
activity (which included books, art prints and business shares) may have
used up all its productive capability.

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After WW I, Imbert's production
of hotel labels dwindled. The label at right, from 1920, shows the coming
of art-deco particularly in the lettering, which may be compared with
the art nouveau type in the Richter-inspired label above for the Hotel
de l'Europe in Aix. By this time, most of the printer's production was
for hotels in Grasse with two noteworthy exceptions, one of which is a
series of generic non-lithographic labels done for the hotellerie of Menton,
which are the only Imbert labels that are common today.

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The second exception is, of
course, the fabled bellboy-calling-the-name-of-the-hotel label for the
Victoria in Cannes, possibly the most beloved hotel luggage label ever
designed. The original Imbert version (at left) is quite rare and probably
dates from the mid 1920s. The label was later reprinted by an unknown
printer but this more recent and rather common version (with the hotel
owner's name "Walsdorff" coming out of the boy's shout) is much
inferior in lithographic quality.

Imbert & Cie was still
active as a printer during WW II, employing a gifted Swiss lithographer,
but no hotel labels of its production are undeniably datable to after
the 1920s. Practically all of its lithographic labels are rare and most
are desirable collector's items. It goes down in history as the one great
printer that could, on quality of design and workmanship, have challenged
the supremacy of Richter and Trüb... but never cared to do so!